Manufacturers generally strive to provide components with as long a useful life as possible and which at the same time are simple and inexpensive to produce. To that end measurement concepts are (further) developed, by means of which the loads imposed on the components in the form of forces or torques, and deformations that result from them, are detected and the measured loads or the corresponding measurement signals are further processed and/or can be used for diagnostic purposes.
From DE 10 2008 001 006 A1, a wheel suspension system for a vehicle is known, which comprises several wheel suspension elements and wherein the deformation in at least one element of the wheel suspension is detected by means of a special measurement arrangement. For that purpose the component whose deformation should be measured has to be prepared in a special manner. For example, this is done by the application of permanent magnetization with locally different intensity, in the manner of a so-termed magnetic coding.
This has the disadvantage that a material specially suited to and prepared for this application has to be used, which material itself constitutes the component to be measured or is worked into the component as a supplementary material. A special magnetic coding of the material is very costly and makes it impossible to use the measurement process—having regard to the nature of the material—on any arbitrary materials. Moreover, a further difficulty of magnetic coding is that its long-term stability is hard or even impossible to ensure. Another disadvantage consists in that the detection and evaluation of a static magnetic field is sensitive to interfering fields in the surroundings, and conversely, so that in the automotive sector manufacturers prescribe the avoidance of static magnetic fields.
In special applications, such as chassis, it is desirable to be able to use almost any desired materials for the production of corresponding components in order to keep the production processes unchanged or at least inexpensive.